Many Older People Embrace Vaccines. Research Is Proving Them Right.; The New York Times, June 14, 2025

Paula Span, The New York Times ; Many Older People Embrace Vaccines. Research Is Proving Them Right.

[Kip Currier: Read my previous post. Then reflect on this New York Times article highlighting the benefits and promise of vaccine-related research. We as individuals and members of societies have so much to lose as a result of the anti-science policy positions and decisions of RFK, Jr. and this Trump administration.

Consider the documented benefits of vaccine research throughout prior decades that lead to revolutionary medical advances like vaccines for Polio, Measles, Mumps, Rubella, Pertussis, Hepatitis, Shingles, HPV, MPox, COVID, and more.]

[Excerpt]

"For older adults who express more confidence in vaccine safety than younger groups, the past few months have brought some welcome research. Studies have found important benefits from a newer vaccine and enhanced versions of older ones, and one vaccine may confer a major bonus that nobody had foreseen.

The new studies are coming at a fraught political moment. The nation’s health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has long disparaged certain vaccines, calling them unsafe and saying that the government officials who regulate them are compromised and corrupt.

This week, the secretary fired a panel of scientific advisers to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, replacing them with some who have been skeptical of vaccines. But so far, Mr. Kennedy has not tried to curb access to the shots for older Americans.

The evidence that vaccines are beneficial remains overwhelming."

‘It’s almost magical’: how robotic pets are helping UK care home residents; The Guardian, September 1, 2023

 Robert Booth, The Guardian; ‘It’s almost magical’: how robotic pets are helping UK care home residents

"It is not the first time care homes have experimented with robots. With mixed results, Japan has invested hundreds of millions of pounds in developing potential devices such as Hug, a lifting robot; Paro, a robotic seal; and Pepper, a “lovable” humanoid robot. In 2021 it was reported that production of Pepper had been halted...

With one in 10 social care jobs vacant, a temptation may be to use the pets to free up pressed staff from spending time with residents. Care workers at Oak Manor, where the pets have been used for a year, said they must not be deployed in the same way some parents pacify children with iPads. Success comes when the pets provide a familiar focus when agitation and anxiety is rising and they encourage socialisation as residents pet them together."